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Comment by xyzzyz

4 years ago

When every site was full of <br>s and &nbsp;s back in the day, Google had not been at all confused by it.

Are we sure about that? My recollection is the same, but it would be nice to have some way of ensuring my memory isn't faulty...

  • Just to remind you of how things were when Google first launched (1996): W3C just started with the recommendation of CSS level 1 (https://www.w3.org/Press/CSS1-REC-PR.html), people were using dl, dt, ul, li and blockquote elements for "styling" (layouting really) websites, Internet Explorer 1.0 was launched the year before and most people who wrote HTML documents were amateurs at best. It's a 100% bet that the markup of yore was messed up compared to todays "standards".